Sheriff Arpaio: Why is Obama still running the Justice Dept?

DOJ denied Arpaio his right to a jury trial

WASHINGTON, D.C. – After being convicted of criminal misdemeanor contempt, former Maricopa Co. Sheriff Joe Arpaio continues to attack the Obama holdovers in the Trump Justice Department who seeking to imprison him for enforcing the very immigration laws President Trump has sworn to enforce.

“Why is Barack Obama is still running the Trump Justice Department?” Arpaio asked Infowars.com in an exclusive interview. “Ironically, this is a ‘revenge prosecution’ in which Obama-holdovers in the Justice Department are seeking to enforce a court order that socialist LaRaza lawyer Tom Perez imposed on me because I refused to make Maricopa County into a sanctuary for illegal immigrants.”

The irony of the case is that the criminal misdemeanor contempt charge is being pressed against Arpaio by the Public Integrity Section (PIN) of the Criminal Division of the U.S. Department of Justice – the section within the Justice Department that holds exclusive jurisdiction over the prosecution of alleged criminal official misconduct, as well as over the prosecution of alleged judicial misconduct — a relevant fact in that the actions of District Court Judge Murray Snow have been called into question by Arpaio’s legal team.

“How can the Public Integrity Section of the Justice Department prosecute me when all I did was to honestly enforce the immigration laws currently on the books?” Arpaio asked Infowars.com in an exclusive telephone interview.

“The Public Integrity prosecutors who are still after me are all Obama hold-overs who went so far as to charge me under the wrong statute so they could deny me a jury trial, refusing to drop their open-borders amnesty agenda,” he argued.

“How is it that Attorney General Sessions ignored a letter Sheriff Arpaio’s attorneys had hand-delivered to his office, when all Sheriff Arpaio requested was that the Justice Department consider insisting the Public Integrity Section would allow hi my right as a U.S. citizen to a trial before a jury of my peers?” Arpaio asked.

“It’s ironic that I’m being persecuted by Obama hold-overs Justice Department Public Integrity Section that thinks denying me a jury trial by erroneously using an inappropriate statute, even after being made aware of this by my attorneys, somehow doesn’t implicate them in official misconduct and the potential to be criminally prosecuted themselves,” Arpaio insisted.

“A revenge prosecution”

Infowars.com has previously reported the case against Arpaio began with the 2007 traffic stop that resulted in the arrest of Ortega Melendres, a Mexican tourist who was a passenger in an automobile stopped in Cave Creek, Maricopa County.

Melendres charged the Maricopa County sheriff’s officers were “fundamentally stopping brown-skinned people with the pretext of looking for criminals.”

The case developed into a class action lawsuit that caught the attention of Eric Holder and Tom Perez, then in the Civil Rights division of the Obama Justice Department.

Arpaio, a target of the Obama administration for years because of his determination to enforce strictly existing immigration laws, was seen by Perez, acting under the orders of Eric Holder, as implementing in the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office (MCSO) a “systematic policy” that set law enforcement rules and procedures to be intentionally discriminatory to the rights of Hispanics.

Perez began his legal career as a LaRaza attorney in Maryland. He currently is Chair of the Democratic National Committee, a major force in moving the Democratic Party in a hard-left direction.

Now at 85-years-old, after a distinguished career that includes service in the U.S. Army from 1950-1953, service as a police officer in Washington, D.C., and Las Vegas, Nevada, as well as working as a top federal drug enforcement officer in foreign countries and the United States. Arpaio, a former DEA narcotics agent and head of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, U.S. Department of Justice, for Arizona, faces criminal charges that could see him convicted to six-months in jail if found guilty.

Arpaio’s plea to Attorney General Jeff Sessions ignored

Arpaio’s attorney, Mark Goldman, Goldman & Zillinger PLLC in Scottsdale, AZ, sent to Attorney General Sessions a letter dated June 22, 2017, that was requesting the Department of Justice to consider various pleas before the start of the bench trial then scheduled to begin on Monday, June 26, 2017, before U.S. District Judge Susan R. Bolton, in Phoenix, Arizona.

Infowars.com has confirmed that several efforts were made to contact Attorney General Sessions directly and through trusted intermediaries in an effort to get Justice Department attention to Goldman’s letter.

Infowars.com can also confirm that Attorney General Sessions was insolated within the Justice Department so that all attempts to communicate with him failed.

Ultimately, Goldman’s letter was ignored, and with the Justice Department’s failure to intervene in the case, Judge Bolton began the bench trial against Arpaio as originally scheduled.

“The criminal contempt allegations stem from an alleged failure of the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Offices (MCSO) to comply with an Order of the Court (preliminary injunction) dated December 23, 2011,” Goldman’s letter read.

“This charge relates back to the prior Obama administration and a time when the Sheriff’s practices were in direct opposition to the Obama administration in regards to immigration policy,” Goldman’s letter continued. “The Sheriff was enforcing the law. The Obama administration appears to have been interested in doing the opposite for apparent political reasons.”

In the letter, Goldman argued the Obama Justice Department allowed Arpaio to be charged with criminal contempt misdemeanor charges under the wrong statute, precisely because the statute of limitations on the correct statute had run out, and the incorrect statute allowed Judge Bolton to deny Arpaio the right to a jury trial.

Here is what Goldman wrote:

“In regards to other aspects of the prosecution, we request that you reconsider the DOJ’s prosecution of this matter because it was incorrectly brought under 18 U.S.C. Section 401. Section 401 relates to a simple criminal contempt of a lawful order. The matter should have been brought under 18 U.S.C. Section 402. Section 402 applies to contumacious conduct that is also a separate crime as more particularly described in the attached Petition. The allegations in this matter compel it to be prosecuted under 18 U.S.C. Section 402 that entitles the offender to a jury trial in accordance with 18 U.S.C. Section 3691. Additionally, Section 402 offenses come with a one year statute of limitations.

“Given that the matter was not charged under the correct statute, and consequently the Department of Justice has deprived Sheriff Arpaio of his jury trial right and the applicable statute of limitations, in the interest of justice we request that you move the Court to dismiss the criminal contempt proceedings or, at the very least, move the Court to stay the trial pending a full review of this matter by your office.

“Time is of the essence for the reason that this matter.”

Goldman also argued the Obama Justice Department had timed various announcement coincident with Arizona voting deadlines in 2016, so as to influence voters to defeat Arpaio’s bid for re-election – an effort that is in direct conflict with DOJ policies instituted by Eric Holder.

“The announcements had an undeniable effect upon Sheriff Arpaio’s campaign to be elected to a seventh term in office,” Goldman wrote. “The impact on Sheriff Arpaio’s re-election campaign is clear. He is no longer Sheriff.”

Obama and Lynch plan to oust Arpaio from office

Largely as a result of the adverse publicity from facing criminal contempt charges, Arpaio lost on Nov. 8, 2016, his seventh bid to be elected Maricopa County Sheriff.

The challenger, Paul Penzone, a Democrat and a former Phoenix police sergeant who lost to Arpaio in 2012, won the sheriff’s election in 2016 only after the Justice Department under Attorney General Loretta Lynch announced criminal charges would be brought against Arpaio. This, combined with George Soros backing Penzone’s campaign positioned to Arizona’s growing Hispanic population.

Throughout the entire case, the Obama DOJ pursued Arpaio with a vengeance.

On Jan. 5, 2012, when the Department of Justice dropped the initial criminal case against Arpaio in favor of pursuing the civil case, the Department of Justice sent the author an email, explaining, “If MCSO wants to debate the facts rather than fixing the problems stated in our findings, we will do so by way of litigation.”

According to information provided the author by a credible whistleblower, while the Department of Justice was prosecuting Arpaio from 2008 to 2010, the National Security Agency conducted electronic surveillance of the various Arizona-based federal judges on the case, as well as on Arpaio, and on the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office.

At the same time, Department of Justice attorneys under the direction of Attorney General Eric Holder maintained an on-going telephone back-channel discussion with the federal judge assigned to handle the case.

That the Department of Justice conspired to defeat Arpaio is suggested by the timing of his criminal indictment.

In mid-October 2016, with the election approximately three weeks away, the Justice Department announced that lawyers were preparing to file criminal contempt of court charges against Arpaio for his alleged violation of Judge Stone’s orders in the Melendres case.

Then, on Nov. 4, 2016, four days before the election, Politico reported Soros had contributed over $3 million to a Soros-funded PAC, Maricopa Strong, to defeat Arpaio.

Obama holdovers in DOJ seek prison time for Arpaio

On July 31, Judge Bolton found that Arpaio was guilty of misdemeanor criminal contempt.

As Infowars.com has previously reported, Arpaio’s attorney Mark Goldman explained to Infowars.com in an exclusive telephone interview and follow-up email that the judge in the case, U.S. District Susan R. Bolton, was so biased against Arpaio that she could have written her opinion before the trial even started, stating her prejudice from the start that Arpaio was guilty of misdemeanor civil contempt guilty conviction.

Arpaio’s attorneys are in the process of appealing the misdemeanor criminal court conviction that has the possibility of forcing him to serve jail time, depending upon the sentencing order Judge Snow is expected to order on Oct. 5, 2017, after the DOJ probation department prepares its presentence investigation report.

Arpaio still has a petition for a writ of mandamus before the Supreme Court, asking the Supreme Court to intervene directly in the case with a ruling that Arpaio’s request for a jury trial should have been granted.